Garmin Nuvi 885T: GPS Product Review

Garmin International
Garmin is a manufacturer of GPS navigational products. Currently their product line extends to the Aviation, Automotive, Fitness and Recreational Markets. Being the number one manufacturer of these products in NA has caused some other smaller companies to enter the market in an attempt to steal market share from them. Currently with $1B in reserves, the current economy is only hurting them in the sales department. They are currently reducing operating costs and reducing the number of units they have on hand in anticipation of the economic downturn.

Nuvi 885T
The Garmin Nuvi 885T is Garmin's current flagship model. Building upon all their previous models they just keep adding features. With each new model they implement some new feature. With this model they have a long list of features which may or may not be all the impressive.

Speech Recognition
With the Nuvi 880 they introduced Voice Recognition. This required that you have an attachment placed on your steering wheel which I didn't really like but it did prevent the unit from trying to recognize each and every word that you spoke. Usually it had some issues understanding what I would say and I had to type it in manually so for me this was not a feature that I found to be all the impressive.

MSN Direct
This is a feature that they introduced a few models back. Through a subscription based service you are able to pull up local weather, gas prices, local traffic, and stock and movie information. There have been some additional updates to the information that the service provides such as being able to send locations to the unit via MSN Direct from a computer. Also added was the ability to plan trips on the computer and send them to your unit via the computer also. For me the best feature of the MSN Direct was the local traffic and local gas prices. With the hefty price tag on the Nuvi 885T and the additional price of the subscription I had to try and save as much as possible with it.